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At Edmonton City Hall, I go on strike for this March 8 morning, a kind of compromise with myself to not work. To sit among others to celebrate International Women’s Day. And my thoughts turn to yesterday at dawn –

At what point should Boyden’s identity quest have been identified as no more than a desiring machine?

I pose this question to myself as someone who has been teaching and writing about Canadian literature and culture over more than thirty years. Joseph Boyden perpetually posed as part Indigenous, an improvised status that afforded him access to advice, teachings, prestige and awards reserved for Indigenous persons. This is misguided and wrong.

I take little pleasure in part of this public debate. The talented and accomplished writer Joseph Boyden is suffering a serious and damaging and humiliating public critique. But I remain unflaggingly sympathetic to those who write about the losses within the Indigenous community when someone inauthentically takes up their space in the public sphere. To those writers and thinkers who already suffer the perils of a colonizing and racist nation state, the marginalization and the damage endures. And I understand the intensity of these critiques especially by those whose community identities or personal influence were particularly exploited. (The list of those active in this debate include Marilyn Dumont, Daniel Justice Heath,

For much of its contemporary history, Beirut has been characterised as the Paris of the Middle East, a cosmopolitan metropolis that misfortune has placed in the middle of a region otherwise hostile to the civilised pleasures of material excess, free-flowing alcohol and exposed female skin.

Of course, Beirut’s Parisian charm has tended to become less apparent during periods of mass sectarian slaughter. In the introduction to his seminal text Orientalism, the late Edward Said notes repercussions of civil conflict in Lebanon on the European consciousness:

“On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that ‘it had once seemed to belong to … the Orient of [18th- and 19th-century French Romantic writers] Chateaubriand and Nerval’. He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”

The terror attacks in Beirut, “Paris of the Middle East” and Paris, France – tragedies filled with laments for the dead and injured – inspire a predicatable response.

Beirut’s story is one of two suicide bombers. An explosion. A father and his young daughter are out for a walk.Adel Termos notices a second man approaching those who gathered after the first attack at the mosque a. And he acts. This man on the street throws himself on the second suicide bomber. He and his daughter die of course but dozens of other potential victims survive. The story barely surfaces and disappears with the name and number of the victims: 43 anonymous bodies in Beirut dead in the street and over two hundred wounded. But Beirut is so far away on the margins of the orient in “Lebanon, a small Mediterranean country with a history of civil war, [which] has seen deadly spillovers from the Syrian conflict.”

In Paris, three times as many people die and many are wounded in a meticulously executed multiple-site series of attacks. And there is unending international attention to this story. We are appalled over and over and over again as the maps fill up with explosive stars of red identifying the Cambodian cafe, the stadium, the concert stage, the street….

But the wreckage of these two narratives turn on who we recognize as deserving of elegies and our attention. Paris fills us with the romance of where we may have been, European romance and the short-cropped hair of Jean Seberg for those of us who remember, the streets of beloved museums and cafes. Simone de Beauvoir’s cigarette and the eye of Jean Paul Sartre. A bridge of love locks. A photograph of my mother in 1956, bleached blond hair, a beauty, standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Over the years, Paris remains the cobblestone destination honeymoon destination.

We don’t think about the suburbs of alienated youth, the police actions, the racist legacy of Le Pen and the father/daughter’s inheritance, the prohibition of Muslim dress for women. The will to bomb the Middle East. None of this justifies the attacks. But one of the everyday pivots of life in the city is inequality and non-fraternity along racial grounds.

Our new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to the public in the aftermath of this catastrophe in measured tones. None of the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament patriarch who would have us ramping up military action. . Thank you for your measured commentary.

The conversation about the marginalization of those candidates who criticize Israel and identify with Palestine sounds with the passions of diverse voices but only some of them count. Some are silenced and deemed irrelevant in the urgent sluice called “getting elected.”

To some Canadians the Palestinian issues register as “ours” versus “theirs”. To say this is here and that is (t)here is difficult if you are interconnected with familial, historical, religious, or regional ties both here and (t)here – the threads trace the rich histories of our lives. This conversation about whether the issue resonates with a Canadian voter invites us to think through ethnicity, identity, and racialization – and empathy. And we must think through “all my relations” – an Indigenous concept that informs Mayor Natanine’s philosophy about Palestine. To decide to prioritize issues relevant to “here” in an election year is to cut off and exile those with strong ties to “here” as well as a particular elsewhere brought close through actual relations, blood or adopted, or through the imagined relations of knowledge, analysis and empathy.

Where there is no “diversity with equity” the shadow of racism falls. And we must speak out.

You don’t slice and dice justice in the interests of expediency. Why the silence on this ongoing purge of NDPs who have a conscience about Palestine. Not an important election issue? Tell that to the Muslim and Arab Canadians who have been exiled and demonized for the past decade and beyond. Or to anyone who works in solidarity with Indigenous issues and identifies with the Palestinians. Tell that to those concerned about Canada’s extremist foreign policy and uncritical support of Netanyahu’s Israel. Harper just bought Israeli Iron Dome missiles for Canada that were test driven in Gaza massacres last summer. Would a different government order more?

Visiting my beautiful 86-year-old ailing mother a few days ago, she reminded me why we must speak out: “I gave birth to my voice in giving birth to you,” she said. And it is true. My birthdate in 1951 meant I grew up in an era informed by the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements where change informed actions. The ongoing efforts of the Women’s Liberation Movement made it possible for some women to struggle to speak out about injustice. And over the decades, it is clear that only some women benefitted from this noisy conversation. Many Indigenous peoples have been left behind as the 2012 report on NunavutHuman Development Index indicates.

Jerry Natanine’s words should be our own: “I often side with the Palestinians because of all the hardship they are facing and because nothing is being re-built over there.” Translate his sentence and you find yourself writing about “(t)here.”

People say ‘Alberta is not an NDP province.’ And I say they are right.…Alberta doesn’t belong to a political party. Alberta belongs to Albertans.

Rachel Notley 3 May, 2015

Why do I think NDP ALBERTA will win?
31% more people voted in the advance polls. 12% more voters registered this election.
Why?
A friend quipped: “Because they have a choice and can imagine change!”

Why is Rachel winning? Insert here all of the polls, the articles east west north south about Rachel’s skill, gifts, history, talents.

Here’s the poll that was published the day before the election with huge NDP numbers and a majority government predicted. Will this come true? Who knows.

Hypothetical begins with the same letter as Hope! It is now 1:29pm election day and I can manage hope for a few more hours until we all gather to watch the election returns and come to know what has transpired.

Why will Rachel win? Imagine the wonderful community, the excellent numerous campaign workers and the well-funded campaign and you have a story about the transformation of Alberta.

Will NDP win? The opposition underwhelms —

The PC’s leader Prentice has the charm of a board-room bureaucrat.

The Wild Rose limps on with a leader who might win votes. Fenceposts have been elected in Alberta.

The Alberta Party barely breathes.

The Green Party makes excellent arguments but doesn’t have the voter base.

“Nobody told us we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study.”“Nobody told us…”Language links us through time illustrating the then of that time and the now of…well you know that old phrase of hope in the powers of presentism to obliterate the distracting melancholy of regret.Then and now. What a poem means in 1977 or 1981 and what now in 2014?

“…we have to study our lives…”

But this recent interview reminds me of this Adrienne Rich quote from her 1978 poem “Transcendental Etude” from her collection The Dream of a Common Language: “Nobody told us we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study.” I might have read this two years after I left a very sad and bad marriage and three years after my father died by suicide. My own sense of myself had collapsed. It was a hard time. Of course.

“…make of our lives a study…”

I worked at various jobs and returned to university part-time to study. Reading and writing and my friends and the Women’s Liberation Movement saved my life. I might have read this Rich poem in 1978 but I think it was later when I saw Adrienne Rich and Nicole Brossard give a talk in Toronto on my birthday in 1981. Then I was reading Adrienne Rich and Nicole Brossard in earnest. And writing a dissertation about feminist poetics was my translation of the phrase by Adrienne Rich. There was nothing academic about it.

It’s worth repeating: “Nobody told us we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study.”

Recently this line emerges in an interview discussion of anti-racist pedagogy and it reminds me of a way to upend the kinds of tensions that can emerge in classrooms where diversity informs the writing and lives of students. Peggy MacIntosh wrote about white privilege and male privilege in a famous 1988 essay. And I’m reminded how white privilege, the women’s movement and hard work helped me get a university job. Peggy MacIntosh is still at work at 79 years developing the anti-racist work she wrote about decades ago. In this interview, she reminds us how compassion and probing the limits of our understanding can be key to our work in the classroom. It is difficult to live up to the ideal but try try again is a teacher’s thematic.

Q: “You seem to relate to the idea of privilege in a very compassionate way. But isn’t that hard, since the effects of privilege are so unjust? Isn’t it natural for privilege to make people angry, rather than openhearted? I imagine Tal Fortgang in a college seminar, and the rancor that must accompany conversations about privilege in the classroom. How do you defeat that?

Peggy MacIntosh: The key thing is to let people testify to their own experience. Then they’ll stop fighting with each other. One of my colleagues at SEED says, “Unless you let the students testify to what they know, which schools usually don’t let them do, they will continue to do just what the dominant society wants them to do, which is to tear each other apart.” The students who are sitting there fighting with one another aren’t allowed to have their lives become the source for their own growth and development. Adrienne Rich wrote, at the beginning of women’s studies, “Nobody told us we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study.”

Despite these stated commitments in both international obligations as well as within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there remain significant gender inequalities in the life experiences and distribution of opportunities among women and men, and between women, in Canada. For example, in 2007 the average earnings of women working full-time, full year were 71.4 percent of those of men; women accounted for 60 percent of all minimum wage earners in Canada in 2008; even after transfers and tax credits, 24 percent of Canadian single parent women were poor as were 19 percent of unattached senior women (compared to 14.7 percent of men); only 39 percent of unemployed women received EI benefits compared to 45 percent of men; and, regulated child care spaces existed for 18.6 percent of children 0 to 12 in Canada in 2008.

While women in all social groups face inequalities compared to men, there are also significant differences among women. The erosion of social rights is particularly pronounced among racialized women (29 percent live in poverty), aboriginal women (36 percent live in poverty) and women with disabilities (26 percent live in poverty).